Mike Podhorzer has recently been publishing articles regarding his xK%, primarily using Baseball-Reference’s strike rates. I have been trying for a few years now to come up with my own using StatCast numbers, and you’d be surprised how little data is required to get a very close xK% and xBB% for both hitters and pitchers.

I love Mike’s work, but that xK% equation is a bit unwieldy, including seven inputs, two of which have a correlation of -.829. It also uses roughly 63% of the pitches seen by hitters by accounting for all strikes, in addition to three other variables on top of that. I wanted to come up with something simpler that didn’t require so much input and wasn’t so overly constrained. After all, if we throw so much data in there that we basically know the outcome before we start, what good is it going forward? To that end, I dove into StatCast to see what might work. Read the rest of this entry »